LogFAQs > #932833154

#56. Janice Rand
#55. Christine Chapel

Say what you want about either of these two, but they are essentially the same boring character. Janice Rand's greatest sin is that she barely matters, disappears after the first half a season, and then starts showing up in the movies and on the Flashback episode of Voyager because Grace Lee Whitney never managed to do anything else with her acting career. She then gets replaced by Christine Chapel, who fills the same token woman in a short skirt for Shatner and the Boys to leer at role, although with the added, ultimately pointless wrinkle that she's hopelessly in love with Spock. This is never adequately explored, and often goes long stretches of the series being ignored even in scenarios where it would make sense for it to come up I adore the episode Amok Time, for instance, but it's kind of comical that all Chapel does in that episode is get soup thrown at her. I do feel bad for Majel Barret here, as she was a pretty competent actress who often got saddled with really bad parts. Getting demoted from the original Number One in The Cage to token nurse lady must have been quite a blow, but it's really telling when your best role in the franchise is almost certainly voice of starship computer.

So yeah, these characters are pretty inextricable from each other in my mind, and the only reason Chapel ranks higher is because she's played by a slightly better actress and gets slightly more to do than the nothing at all Janice Rand ended up with over the course of the series. Neither one is worth spending much time or energy talking about, in my mind, and they honestly barely belong on a ranking list over the likes of Guinan or Weyoun in the first place; merely on the technicality of their billing in the show.